The gothic novel in Ireland, c. 1760–1829

The gothic novel in Ireland, 1760–1830 offers a compelling account of the development of gothic literature in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Ireland. Against traditional scholarly understandings of Irish gothic fiction as a largely late-nineteenth century development, this study recovers to view a whole body of Irish literary production too often overlooked today. Its robust examination of primary texts, the contexts in which they were produced, and the critical perspectives from which they have been analysed yields a rigorous account of the largely retrospective formal and generic classifications that have worked to eliminate eighteenth-century and Romantic-era Irish fiction from the history of gothic literature. The works assessed here powerfully demonstrate that what we now understand as typical of ‘the gothic novel’– medieval, Catholic Continental settings; supernatural figures and events; an interest in the assertion of British modernity – is not necessarily what eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers or writers would have identified as ‘gothic’. They moreover point to the manner in which scholarly focus on the national tale and allied genres has effected an erasure of the continued production and influence of gothic literature in Romantic Ireland. Combining quantitative analysis with meticulous qualitative readings of a selection of representative texts, this book sketches a new formal, generic, and ideological map of gothic literary production in this period. As it does so, it persuasively positions Irish works and authors at the centre of a newly understood paradigm of the development of the literary gothic across Ireland, Britain, and Europe between 1760 and 1830.

‘Christina Morin's The gothic novel in Ireland c. 1760–1829 is a significant intervention in the study of Anglo-Irish literature and the gothic tradition. Combining a masterful overview of Romantic era print culture with close readings of hitherto under examined novels, this book suggestively explores the generic interconnectedness between gothic fiction, the national tale and the historical novel. In doing so, it brings to light a much earlier tradition of fiction that emerged from Ireland in the mid-eighteenth century and had a clear impact on the British novelists who followed. As such, The gothic novel in Ireland confidently dispatches long-held views of Irish gothic as a belated phenomenon that emerged in the later nineteenth century. At the same time, Morin delineates acutely the specific conventions and tropes that characterised a distinctively Irish variant of the gothic. Marshalling an impressive range of literary sources, bibliographical evidence and statistical data, Morin provocatively disrupts long-held assumptions about the formative role played by Irish writers at a crucial moment in the history of the novel, making a compelling case for a more nuanced and accurate understanding of the literary relationship between Britain and Ireland during the Romantic century.'Anthony Mandal, Professor of Print and Digital Cultures, Cardiff University

‘The Gothic Novel in Ireland is a very welcome mapping of an almost completely unknown body of fiction – the early Irish Gothic novel. Morin not only brings to an end the literary historical amnesia which allowed so much interesting, important and often compelling fiction to be forgotten, but effectively rescues these novels from what Franco Moretti calls the "slaughterhouse of literature". This study will provide Irish Studies and Gothic Studies scholars with a comprehensive sense of the sheer amount of early Irish Gothic fiction, as well as clarifying how this body of work relates to "canonical" Irish and, indeed, European fiction, and performing exemplary close readings of a sensibly chosen selection of neglected novels. Crucially, Morin carefully refocuses attention on what eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers, critics, and readers understood as "gothic", rather than retrospectively applying twentieth-century reformulations, and offers a compelling alternative to the current terminological impasse in Irish Gothic scholarship. Morin's writing itself is a model of clarity and critical generosity, meaning the study is immensely readable and can be enthusiastically recommended to students as well as critics and scholars. This is the most significant intervention in Irish Gothic Studies for years.'Jarlath Killeen, Lecturer in Victorian Literature at Trinity College Dublin

‘When does the gothic novel begin and end? What are its characteristics? And where does Ireland fit in the literary terrain marked out by modern critics? In this valuable exploration, Christina Morin remaps time, place, and content. She argues that by giving sustained attention to Irish gothic literature we can (and should) widen, deepen, and redefine a field whose formal and generic properties have been at once slippery and overly restrictive… Morin carefully dismantles stereotypes and brings fresh eyes to established conventions. She asks probing questions about why some writers fall into neglect—what Franco Moretti dubbed the slaughterhouse of literature—and looks anew at those judged worthy of the attentions of posterity. For students of the period, this will be an essential text: meticulously researched and attractively written.Eighteenth-Century Fiction
January 2020

Spectators, aesthetics and encompletion

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This book discusses early modern English drama as a part of visual culture. It concerns the ideas about 'making and unmaking' that Shakespeare and his contemporaries may have known and formulated, and how these ideas relate to the author's own critical assumptions about early modern aesthetic experience. The study of drama as a part of visual culture offers the perfect context for an exploration of pre-modern aesthetic discourse. The book expounds the author's approach to plays as participants in a lively post-Reformation visual culture in the process of 're-formation'. It then focuses on the social meanings of patronage of the visual arts in a discussion of Paulina as patron of Hermione's image in The Winter's Tale. The discussion of The Winter's Tale pivots around the play's troubling investment in patriarchal notions of 'perfection'. The book also explores image-breaking in Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. This play presents an instance of onstage iconoclasm in the supernatural destruction of a demonic brazen head, a quasi-magical figure that had been depicted in English literature since at least the twelfth century. In focusing on the portrayal of invisibility in The Two Merry Milkmaids, the book explores early modern preoccupation with processes of visual construction in a play in which there is very little artisanal activity.

Gender, sexuality and transgression

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This book demonstrates that incest was representative of a range of interests crucial to writers of the Gothic, often women or homosexual men who adopted a critical stance in relation to the heteronormative patriarchal world. In repositioning the Gothic, representations of incest are revealed as synonymous with the Gothic as a whole. The book argues that extending the traditional endpoint of the Gothic makes it possible to understand the full range of familial, legal, marital, sexual and class implications associated with the genre's deployment of incest. Gothic authors deploy the generic convention of incest to reveal as inadequate heteronormative ideologies of sexuality and desire in the patriarchal social structure that render its laws and requirements arbitrary. The book examines the various familial ties and incestuous relationships in the Gothic to show how they depict and disrupt contemporary definitions of gender, family and desire. Many of the methodologies adopted in Gothic scholarship and analyses of incest reveal ongoing continuities between their assumptions and those of the very ideologies Gothic authors strove to disrupt through their use of the incest trope. Methodologies such as Freudian psychoanalysis, as Botting argues, can be positioned as a product of Gothic monster-making, showing the effect of Gothic conventions on psychoanalytic theories that are still in wide use today.

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This book will come as a revelation to Shakespeare scholars everywhere. It
reveals the identity of the playwright and Shakespeare’s colleague behind the
mask of Jaques in As You Like It. It pinpoints the true first night of
Twelfth Night and reveals why the play’s performance at the Inns of Court
was a momentous occasion for shakespeare. It also the identities Quinapalus, the
Vapians, Pigrogromitus and Feste, as well as the ‘Dark Lady’ of the Sonnets and
the inspiration for Jessica in The Merchant of Venice. And it solves
Shakespeare’s greatest riddle: the meaning of M.O.A.I. in Twelfth
Night. In sum, this book reveals William Shakespeare as a far more personal
writer than we have ever imagined.